1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to, but is not limited to, electronic device manufacturing, and in particular, to the field of circuitry imprinting.
2. Description of Related Art
The substrate imprinting technology is a relatively new technique for substrate build-up in which circuitry is directly printed into a dielectric material by means of a hot-embossing or imprinting process. This process uses a substrate imprint tool, which is typically made from a metal or an alloy such as nickel, to imprint circuitry features onto an insulation or dielectric (herein “dielectric”) layer. The dielectric layer may be formed on top of a rigid core such as a substrate for an integrated circuit package. The circuitry features that are imprinted onto the dielectric layers may include features for interconnects such as vias and traces.
In cases where metal traces and vias are being formed, a substrate imprint tool may be used to imprint into the dielectric layer the circuitry features (in this case, via and trench recesses) that will be used to form the traces and vias. This is typically followed by a dielectric cure and an etch step that clears the circuitry features before a metal plating process, which creates the electrical interconnects.